As tech has grown, policy debates have become an important pastime. Today’s tech industry aspires to replace human drivers with self-driving cars, secretaries with AI assistants, permanent jobs with gigs — and as a result, the human impact of tech has become an everyday conversation.

No other idea is as emblematic of this as Universal Basic Income, a policy that would distribute a monthly sum to every adult regardless of their income or employment status.

The conversation is widespread. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have said that UBI may be desirable or necessary. Y-Combinator Research and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are running basic income studies. Tech-friendly presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Andrew Yang support the issue.

But should the average tech entrepreneur or investor support UBI? The answer is not entirely clear.

The good news is that the tech industry is deeply familiar with risk, which is an important component of arguments for UBI. The bad news: risk isn’t the whole story, and both positive and negative evidence for the policy are currently thin.

The role of risk

Entrepreneurs understand the risk component of UBI because it’s the same risk they take in starting companies. Many entrepreneurs start with savings or seed funding that reduce their downside risk — and it’s not hard for them to imagine that others lack these resources. A UBI could solve the issue.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what you needed to build. You needed to build some software that would allow hotels to manage this process as well as users to make bookings in this mode...

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Mark Selcow: We had a market thesis that more and more employers were going to steer their employees to high-deductible plans because they work. There seemed to be a possible regulatory tailwind...

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According to a Market Watch report, the global connected home market is estimated to grow 14% annually to reach a valuation of more than $138 billion by 2026. Connected homes include the ability to...

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Niche e-commerce still produces compelling success stories. Read on to see how CEO Brian Lim built iHeartRaves. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from?...

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Asto, the Santander-owned “upstart” developing financial tools for freelancers and SMEs, is adding invoice financing to its bookkeeping app.

The new offering, which potentially opens up so-called “micro-financing” to a much broader business market, comes hot on the heels of Santander Group acquiring Albert, an invoicing and expenses app for freelancers and micro-businesses. Albert’s functionality has now been integrated into Asto, with Albert co-founder Ivo Weevers becoming Asto’s chief product and design officer.

In a call, Weevers described Asto’s mission as wanting to create a “full stack of financial services for self-employed people [and other micro businesses].” Financial services for SMEs is a “huge, fast-growing market,” he says, adding that “Asto is innovating on the bookkeeping side, [while] other players on the market are working on the bank account side.”

“A lot of people are struggling with trying to understand and get access to finances that might help them in growing their business or overcoming certain periods of their business where extra cash would be really handy,” he tells me.

“What we’re doing now is providing a comprehensive solution where we help people with their daily tasks around bookkeeping and understanding where they are financially, but also connecting dots seamlessly with a financial solution. This is what this new micro-financing solution is all about.”

In a demo I’m given of the new invoice financing feature, it all feels relatively painless. After signing up to Asto and applying for the micro-finance option, you’re given an estimated pot of credit from which to drawn down on per invoice financed.

Invoices can be issued simply within the mobile app (or uploaded to it), which in itself is quite a time saver. Anyone who freelances knows that writing invoices and tracking them is a pain. Even more so is waiting to be paid.

Next to each invoice is a finance button. Clicking on it initiates the micro loan, with clear signposting on how much you’ll need to pay back and when. The time frame is based on the payment terms of your issued invoice with a bit of extra leeway if needed.

“Micro-financing used to be accessible only for the larger SMEs, people with financial knowledge and the time to go into a branch and talk to an account manager and wait for a few weeks to get a decision,” explains Weevers.

“One of the innovate steps we are trying to do here is we are making this option available for the smaller end of the SME market, which is by far the biggest and by far the most unserved. By doing it on mobile, which is their favourite device, and also doing it in a matter of minutes rather than having to wait for weeks,” he adds.

Meanwhile, I’m told that the credit itself is provided by Asto via owner Santander. Noteworthy is that the invoice financing feature doesn’t for the time being use transaction data pulled in from bank accounts you have linked to the app. Instead, Asto is using a range of other data points and info you provide when first applying for the micro-financing option.

WorldCover, a New York and Africa-based climate insurance provider to smallholder farmers, has raised a $6 million Series A round led by MS&AD Ventures.

Y Combinator, Western Technology Investment and EchoVC also participated in the round.

WorldCover’s platform uses satellite imagery, on-ground sensors, mobile phones and data analytics to create insurance options for farmers whose crop yields are affected adversely by weather events — primarily lack of rain.

The startup currently operates in Ghana, Uganda and Kenya . With the new funding, WorldCover aims to expand its insurance offerings to more emerging market countries.

“We’re looking at India, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia. India could be first on an 18-month timeline for a launch,” WorldCover co-founder and chief executive Chris Sheehan said in an interview.

The company has served more than 30,000 farmers across its Africa operations. Smallholder farmers are those earning all or nearly all of their income from agriculture, farming on 10-20 acres of land and earning around $500 to $5,000, according to Sheehan.

Farmers connect to WorldCover by creating an account on its USSD mobile app. From there they can input their region and crop type and determine how much insurance they would like to buy and use mobile money to purchase a plan. WorldCover works with payments providers such as M-Pesa in Kenya and MTN Mobile Money in Ghana.

The service works on a sliding scale, where a customer can receive anywhere from 5x to 15x the amount of premium they have paid. If there is an adverse weather event, namely lack of rain, the farmer can file a claim via mobile phone. WorldCover then uses its data-analytics metrics to assess it, and, if approved, the farmer will receive an insurance payment via mobile money.

Common crops farmed by WorldCover clients include maize, rice and peanuts. It looks to add coffee, cocoa and cashews to its coverage list.

For the moment, WorldCover only insures for events such as rainfall risk, but in the future it will look to include other weather events, such as tropical storms, in its insurance programs and platform data analytics.

The startup’s founder clarified that WorldCover’s model does not assess or provide insurance payouts specifically for climate change, though it does directly connect to the company’s business.

“We insure for adverse weather events that we believe climate change factors are exacerbating,” Sheehan explained. WorldCover also resells the risk of its policyholders to global reinsurers, such as Swiss Re and Nephila.

On the potential market size for WorldCover’s business, he highlights a 2018 Lloyd’s study that identified $163 billion of assets at risk, including agriculture, in emerging markets from negative, climate change-related events.

“That’s what WorldCover wants to go after…These are the kind of micro-systemic risks we think we can model and then create a micro product for a smallholder farmer that they can understand and will give them protection,” he said.

With the round, the startup will look to possibilities to update its platform to offer farming advice to smallholder farmers, in addition to insurance coverage.

WorldCover investor and EchoVC founder Eghosa Omoigui believes the startup’s insurance offerings can actually help farmers improve yield. “Weather-risk drives a lot of decisions with these farmers on what to plant, when to plant, and how much to plant,” he said. “With the crop insurance option, the farmer says, ‘Instead of one hector, I can now plant two or three, because I’m covered.’ ”

Insurance technology is another sector in Africa’s tech landscape filling up with venture-backed startups. Other insurance startups focusing on agriculture include Accion Venture Lab-backed Pula and South Africa based Mobbisurance.

With its new round and plans for global expansion, WorldCover joins a growing list of startups that have developed business models in Africa before raising rounds toward entering new markets abroad.

In 2018, Nigerian payment startup Paga announced plans to move into Asia and Latin America after raising $10 million. In 2019, South African tech-transit startup FlexClub partnered with Uber Mexico after a seed raise. And Lagos-based fintech startup TeamAPT announced in Q1 it was looking to expand globally after a $5 million Series A round.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Vikas Choudhury, Managing Partner at Pivot Ventures, and President at Reliance Jio. Vikas is one of the earliest Angel investors in India, and...

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You probably haven’t heard of Checkout, a digital payments processing company that was founded in 2012 in London. Apparently, however, investors have been keeping tabs on the low-flying company and like what they see. Today, Checkout announced that it has raised $230 million in Series A funding at a valuation just shy of $2 billion co-led by Insight Partners and DST Global. Other participants include GIC, the Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund; Blossom Capital; Endeavor Catalyst; and other, unnamed strategic investors.

It’s the first institutional round for the company; it’s also one of the biggest Series A rounds ever for a European company.

What’s so special about Checkout that investors felt compelled to write such big checks? In a sea filled with fintech startups, it’s hard to know at first glance what differentiates it — or whether investors merely spy a huge opportunity, particularly given the company’s recent revenue numbers.

Checkout helps businesses — including Samsung, Adidas, Deliveroo and Virgin, among others — to accept a range of payment types across their online stores around the world. According to the WSJ, the fees from these services are adding up, too. It says Checkout’s European business generated $46.8 million in gross revenue and $6.7 million in profit in 2017, information it dug up through Companies House, the United Kingdom’s registrar of companies.

Checkout also plays into two huge trends that seem to be lifting all boats — the ongoing boom in online shopping, and the growing number of businesses using online payments. Little wonder that investors poured into payments startups last year more than four times what they invested in them in 2017 ($22 billion, according to Dow Jones VentureSource data cited by the WSJ).

Little wonder, too, that payments startups that have gone public are faring well, including the global payments company Adyen, which IPO’d on the Euronext in June of last year and has mostly seen its shares move in one direction since. Indeed, the company, valued at $2.3 billion by investors in 2015, is now valued at nearly $21 billion.

Though Checkout’s Series A is stunning for its size, according to Dealroom data, it isn’t the largest for a European company. Among other giant rounds, the U.K.-based biotech company Immunocore closed on $320 million in Series A funding in 2015. In 2017, another U.K. fintech, OakNorth, a digital bank that focuses on loans for small and medium enterprises, raised $200 million in Series A funding. (It has gone on to raise roughly $850 million altogether.)

More recently, TradePlus24, a two-year-old, Zurich, Switzerland-based fintech company that insures against default the accounts receivables of small and mid-size businesses, also raised a healthy amount: $120 million in Series A funding. Its backers include Credit Suisse and the insurance broker Kessler.

The microbiome testing service uBiome has placed its founders and co-chief executives, Jessica Richman and Zac Apte, on administrative leave following an FBI raid on the company’s offices last week.

The company’s board of directors have named John Rakow, currently the company’s general counsel, as its interim chairman and chief executive, the company said in a statement.

Directors of the company are also conducting an independent investigation into the company’s billing practices, which is being overseen by a special committee of the board.

It was only last week that the FBI went to the company’s headquarters to search for documents related to an ongoing investigation. What’s at issue is the way that the company was billing insurers for the microbiome tests it was performing on customers.

“As interim CEO of uBiome, I want all of our stakeholders to know that we intend to cooperate fully with government authorities and private payors to satisfactorily resolve the questions that have been raised, and we will take any corrective actions that are needed to ensure we can become a stronger company better able to serve patients and healthcare providers,” Rakow said in a statement.

”My confidence is based on the significant clinical evidence and medical literature that demonstrates the utility and value of uBiome’s products as important tools for patients, health care providers and our commercial partners.” added Mr. Rakow.

It’s been a rough few weeks for consumer companies working on developing microbiome testing services and treatments based on those diagnosis. In addition to the FBI raid, the Seattle-based company, Arivale, was forced to shut down its “consumer program” after raising more than $50 million from investors, including Maveron, Polaris Partners and ARCH Venture Partners.

UBiome is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, OS Fund, 8VC, Y Combinator, DNA Capital, Crunchfund, StartX, Kapor Capital, Starlight Ventures and 500 Startups.

Monitoring a space is about a lot more than security cameras. Awair is trying to help businesses and consumers more deeply understand the environments in which they live and work.

Awair has raised a $10 million Series B led by The Westly Group with participation from iRobot, Altos Ventures, Emerson Electric and Nuovo Capital. The company has raised more than $21 million to date.

The company has been plugging along with air-quality monitors that look like they belong in the MoMa. Awair’s $199 monitor senses things like particulate matter, temperature, humidity, and CO² levels. They’ve built out their product line with a couple other devices, but they’re largely targeting air-conscious consumers that might have allergies of another ailments and “design moms” who are looking to get some well-designed tech into their home.

The information all plugs into an app that helps consumers understand what’s happening in their home and get tips for how they can improve air quality.

As the company looks to make venture-worthy returns, it’s been scaling beyond the consumer IoT space into the world of enterprise IoT with its Omni product that Await has been selling to large real estate firms, offices and hospitals, aiming to give companies more insight into what life is like in every corner of their physical spaces.

The devices measure the same things their consumer products do, but also can track ambient light and noise in space, and pipe all of that data into a dashboard that can help businesses automate how they push their existing building infrastructure like their HVAC systems to respond to changes in the environment.

While Awair has been selling consumer IoT devices since 2015, its business product is about 18 months old, and a big part of this fundraise is to bring a sales staff onboard to keep the pace of enterprise expansion, which has been faster growing than the consumer business.

The company says they have more than 300 enterprise customers on the platform, including WeWork, Airbnb, Harvard and The Crown Estate.

Extra Crunch offers members the opportunity to tune into conference calls led and moderated by the TechCrunch writers you read every day. This week, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine and Frederic Lardinois discuss major announcements that came out of Facebook’s F8 conference and dig into how Facebook is trying to redefine itself for the future.

Though touted as a developer-focused conference, Facebook spent much of F8 discussing privacy upgrades, how the company is improving its social impact, and a series of new initiatives on the consumer and enterprise side. Josh and Frederic discuss which announcements seem to make the most strategic sense, and which may create attractive (or unattractive) opportunities for new startups and investment.

“This F8 was aspirational for Facebook. Instead of being about what Facebook is, and accelerating the growth of it, this F8 was about Facebook, and what Facebook wants to be in the future.

That’s not the newsfeed, that’s not pages, that’s not profiles. That’s marketplace, that’s Watch, that’s Groups. With that change, Facebook is finally going to start to decouple itself from the products that have dragged down its brand over the last few years through a series of nonstop scandals.”

Josh and Frederic dive deeper into Facebook’s plans around its redesign, Messenger, Dating, Marketplace, WhatsApp, VR, smart home hardware and more. The two also dig into the biggest news, or lack thereof, on the developer side, including Facebook’s Ax and BoTorch initiatives.

For access to the full transcription and the call audio, and for the opportunity to participate in future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Unshackled Ventures isn’t like other venture capital funds.

The firm invests in immigrant founders and helps them secure visas so they can ditch their corporate job and launch the startup of their dreams. Today, Unshackled is announcing its sophomore fund of $20 million, topping its debut effort by $15.5 million.

“The point is to take the burden off of founders because they are not immigration experts, they are experts at building satellites or extracting protein from plants,” Unshackled founding partner Nitin Pachisia told TechCrunch. “These are people that if you go to a workspace, you’ll see them show up on nights and weekends because they want to build something but they can’t.”

Immigrants looking to start their own businesses face a huge barrier. Take Jyoti Bansal for example. He famously waited seven years before launching AppDynamics, a business that later sold to Cisco for $3.7 billion days before its initial public offering. Why? Because as an Indian immigrant with H-1B visa status, he could work for startups but wasn’t legally allowed to start his own. It wasn’t until receiving an employment authorization document (EAD), a part of the green card process, that Bansal could finally found AppDynamics. If Bansal had the opportunity to pitch to Unshackled, which provides bespoke immigration solutions to each founder, he could have launched AppDynamics years prior.

Immigrant founders, according to a 2018 study by the National Foundation for American Policy, are responsible for 55% of U.S. billion-dollar companies, or “unicorns,” as they are known. Uber, SpaceX, WeWork, Palantir Technologies, Stripe, Slack, Moderna Therapeutics, Robinhood, Instacart, Houzz, Credit Karma, Tanium, Zoox and CrowdStrike all count at least one immigrant co-founder.

“The difference between success and failures is oftentimes who you know and when,” Unshackled founding partner Manan Mehta told TechCrunch. “We can bring those resources at just 1/200th the size of Andreessen Horowitz to immigrants at day zero.”

“We’re creating the best place for immigrants to start their companies,” he added. “And guess what? We’re keeping American innovation in America.”

The firm was founded by Mehta, the son of immigrants, and Pachisia, an Indian immigrant, in 2015. Since then, the duo have written pre-seed checks to 31 companies with a 100% success rate in procuring visas to keep talent working in the U.S. Startups in its portfolio include the very recent Y Combinator graduate Career Karma, Starsky Robotics, Plutoshift, Togg, Hype, Lily AI and more.

“I didn’t think it was possible to start a company on a visa in the U.S., let alone scale one to hit the next major milestone so quickly,” Plutoshift founder Prateek Joshi said in a statement. “That all changed when we met the Unshackled team.”

Mehta and Pachisia say its startups have gone on to raise $54 million in follow-on investments from top investors like First Round Capital, NEA and Shasta.

In addition to supporting companies based in Silicon Valley, the investors search far and wide for aspiring immigrant founders, as well as respond to every single cold email they receive. Recently, they joined the Rise of the Rest tour, a trip hosted by Steve Case and JD Vance that showcases startups in underrepresented geographies, and they make frequent visits to college campuses across the U.S.

Unshackled’s limited partners include Bloomberg Beta, Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures and Emerson Collective.

“I think the name represents the feeling that you’re a little bit shackled to a framework or a policy that doesn’t necessarily encourage entrepreneurship,” Mehta said. “When if you take a step back, immigrants are probably more entrepreneurial than native-born people.”

Meat alternatives are getting a big public market debut with the Beyond Meat public offering, as shares of the company rocketed above their initial list price.

The company’s shares surged up 135% in their market opener, valuing the company as high as $3.52 billion. Volatility was so high on the company’s stock that the Nasdaq had to pause trading of “BYND” shares.

The company’s first trade came in at $46 at 12:18 p.m. Eastern, according to a report in MarketWatch. That’s a whopping 76% above the initial price. Gains extended throughout the morning reaching an intraday high of $63.43 (or around 154% above its initial high) and the stock is now trading at around $55 per share.

The company priced its public offering at $25 per share last night — at the upper end of an already increased share price (likely in response to shareholder demand).

In all the company raised more than $240 million at just under a $1.5 billion valuation through the sale of at least 9.6 million shares when it priced yesterday.

“Beyond Meat is a pioneer of the plant-based meat movement, and the listing is a remarkable and unprecedented move for the industry,” said Bruce Friedrich, the executive director of the sustainable food industry research and watchdog group, the Good Food Institute. “While it’s the first company of its kind to go public, the move could pave a way forward for other plant-based meat makers who will be watching on.”

Investor appetite for the company comes despite its balance sheet problems. Beyond Meat reported a net loss of $29.9 million on $87.9 million in revenue for 2018.

What’s steeling investors’ stomachs for an investment in the company appears to be its gross margins, which came in at 25% for the first quarter and were at 20% for 2018, up from negative margins in the preceding year.

The company’s success could be a harbinger of things to come. There’s a crop of meat substitutes and alternative protein products on the market or coming to market — and they’ve met with enormous customer success.

Earlier this week, Burger King announced that it would begin a nationwide rollout of its Impossible Whopper, and companies like Memphis Meat, which develops lab-grown animal proteins, and Sustainable Bioproducts, another developer of protein replacements, are waiting in the wings to bring their own products to market.

Beyond Meat’s public offering is the second-highest liquidity event for a company in the sustainable foods market. The largest was the WhiteWave Foods acquisition for $12.5 billion by Danone in 2017 after a public listing five years earlier.

“Securing funds like this is a big deal for Beyond Meat and will allow it to ramp up its supply chain capabilities and make delicious plant-based meat accessible to all,” said Friedrich in a statement. “Investors recognize that this is not a niche but a mainstream movement and a huge business opportunity… Beyond Meat is on the frontier of food system transformation. Their success and the successes of other plant-based meat makers could help repair our food system and mitigate the many harms caused by conventional meat production.”

European startups are fast gaining maturity. ByHours is a venture-funded company growing steadily and expanding globally. Read on for a wonderful story. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very...

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Developing new technology, identifying product/market fit, creating a go-to-market strategy… When building businesses, these are the types of challenges entrepreneurs tend to spend the majority of their time thinking about (and talking about with other entrepreneurs). And it’s easy to understand why: These are challenges that entrepreneurs can tackle largely on their own, without having to rely on anyone else.

But you can only solve a small fraction of the problems that you will face if you want to scale. You need to hire.

People – not products – are the lifeblood of hypergrowth companies. Ultimately, the conversations and relationships the people at your company have with customers, potential customers, investors, and others, will determine how successful you are in the long run.

This is a lesson that took me 20+ years and the founding of five companies to learn. Believe me, as an introvert, I’d love to just geek out on the 1% of stuff I can figure out on my own.

Instead, you need to:

Hire people before skills: Scrappiness and cultural fit matter more than intelligence and experience.Hire for the right stage: you will need certain types of people at different points of your growthGet internal feedback but not consensus: hiring managers need to own the decision

This is how hypergrowth companies are born.

3 Hiring Tips for Scaling a High-Growth Startup

Last year, my most recent company, Drift, grew from 80 to 260 people and went from one office in Boston to three, with additions in San Francisco and Seattle. By the end of this year, we’ll be adding a significant number across the offices. And in the years to follow, we’ll likely open offices in EMEA and other regions around the globe.

Earlier this week, Google’s parent, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) reported its first quarter results that, surprisingly, missed market estimates and sent the stock tumbling. A slowdown in the revenues...

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Today’s 442nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, May 2, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 442nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, May 2, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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